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Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.

Hagan, Joe (author).

The first issue of Rolling Stone appeared in November 1967. Its founder was an ambitious kid whose goal in life was to become bigger and more important than Hugh Hefner: specifically, to become the Henry Luce (the founder of Time) for the counterculture. Wenner dared to take rock seriously (Rolling Stone popularized rock criticism) while also reinventing the idea of celebrity and fame around youth culture. He built up a network of important writers and photographers and published articles that covered the movers and shakers of pop culture and politics. It was a potent and popular mix, and it made Wenner, according to Hagan, “the most important magazine editor in America” in the 1970s. Anecdotes about musicians, including Lennon, Springsteen, and Jagger, among others, abound as well as stories involving some of the magazine’s finest writers and photographers, including Hunter S. Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres, Cameron Crowe, Tom Wolfe, Richard Avedon, and Annie Leibovitz. Drawing from more than 100 hours of conversation with Wenner as well as interviews with musicians, writers, publishers, friends, lovers, and past and present employees of the magazine, Hagan has fashioned a fascinating biography of a controversial figure and the iconic publication he started.
 June Sawyers